Derek Owusu’s third, beautifully radical novel Borderline Fiction is unsparing in its evocation of a life in schism.
His narrator Marcus speaks in alternating chapters that witness his experiences at 19 and 25 respectively. These two distinct, but equally poetic voices shift and shimmer over time. At 19, Marcus is a personal trainer in North London, cramming down protein-heavy meals and deadlifting to infinity, with cocaine as his constant companion. His love for Adwoa, one of his gym’s clients, is confronting. She scratches at his silence, but he often slips through the cracks of conversations, behind sofas or into club backrooms.
His childhood has many unspoken fractures, from his Ghanaian parents leaving him with a white foster mother, to the strain of navigating this country as a young black working-class boy. He is terrified of becoming his alcoholic dad, who is and is not Anansi, the storytelling spidergod known for his tricks and tenacity. But Marcus survives as best he can – coming up and down as he self-medicates.
At 25, he is a student at the University of Bolton, reading voraciously – but still beset by the churning of a brain not at ease. He yearns for San, a mesmerising woman who might offer him a true love away from the noise. Their engagement with a rich breadth of Pan-African literature, film and politics, affords them opportunities to collide and shine. Still – their conversations dance around the simmering between them.
As Marcus longs to be held, their union might transform his despair. The borders of his reality pulse with anxiety, as he locates the language for living with borderline personality disorder. Owusu’s gorgeous book is webbed with longing, pain and queer possibilities. He depicts the wintering of a soul, looking up at the sun.
Borderline Fiction by Derek Owusu is out now (Canongate, £18.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.
